This will be my 14th year riding in the Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC)! This year's ride will cover the usual 188 miles across Massachusetts on August 3-4, with as always, 100% of the funds we raise supporting the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

So why does someone who lives in Washington, DC ride a bike across Massachusetts, not just once but 13 times?

It started with my father-in-law, Frank Burstin. I first met him on Cape Cod at the small beach house Helen bought when she lived in Boston. He spent part of every summer there with Helen's mother during their retirement. I can still feel the bear hug he gave me 21 years ago after I proposed to Helen on her favorite beach nearby (we took the photo on the back of my jersey at the Cape house).

Frank, or Poppa as we all called him, survived Auschwitz and four years of concentration camp slave labor. In his sixties, he survived a quadruple bypass. In his early eighties, he was remarkably fit and healthy, but in just three brutal months in 2008, cancer took his life. It robbed us all of the proudest grand-Poppa you’ve ever seen.

Since we vacationed on the Cape every summer, and I learned from participating in the AIDS Rides long ago how my love of long distance cycling could serve a larger good, the PMC was the perfect fit, the ideal way to remember Poppa and honor his life.

I also ride in memory of Deena's best friend, Sophie Magerl, who we lost in 2021 after a two-year battle with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She was just 17 years old. Before she passed away, I made a video about why I ride that told Sophie's story and what it taught me about the value of Dana Farber's work. I hope you will watch if you haven't had the chance, but the short version: Treatments that helped Sophie gain precious time, innovations advanced in part by Dana Farber's research, did not exist when I first rode the PMC.

“Live for today,” Frank wrote, “because yesterday will never return, and who knows what tomorrow will be.” Please take a few minutes, right now, to help make tomorrow a better day for all those battling cancer.

More Links

My Tumblr PMC page - much more on why I ride

@MysteryPollster - My Twitter account

Efraim - A Remembrance of Frank Burstin

This Is Personal - A trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum I'll never forget

Dana Farber Cancer Institute